Finding Aquaman: An exercise in image paleontology

Yesterday, I saw a tweet from Fes of The Webcast Beacon, asking for help in tracking down an artist. I’m guessing he wanted to use an image in the show notes of an upcoming podcast and wanted to credit the creator. Since I had nothing better to do (other than feed the kids and stuff), I decided to accept the challenge (and order pizza).
Here’s the tweet.
And the image.
I plugged the image into Google image search and got a bunch of results. Pro tip: If you go to Google image search and click on the camera thingy, you can submit an image for it to search on.

A lot of the results were blogs and discussion threads, none of which credited the artist.
I was shocked! SHOCKED!
But among the “visually similar” results was one without the motivational poster border. No, I don’t know why Bender’s in there either.
I plugged the borderless image back into image search and got more results. Again, bunch of blogs and stuff. No credit.
Next step? Start restricting the time range. Since I was looking for the oldest reference, I set the To date and left the From blank. I kept stepping backward until I got to 4/1/09 and I saw this.
DeviantART? Yes! I clicked through and found the image, posted under MK01. It was only at that point that I noticed that the original image was signed. When the image was slapped into a motivational border, it was cropped, conveniently removing the artist’s signature. Nice.
So what’s the take-away from all this? Artists don’t get nearly the credit they deserve. Go give one a hug. And if you can’t do that, at least give them a link-back.

It should also be worth mentioning tineye.com, which attempts to automatically do much of what you just described. It succeeds about half the time (in my experience), presumably because they don’t have the machine resources that Google has. In this particular case, tineye.com failed to find the original, but it did quickly locate the full-sized non-demotivational version.